Category: ficly

See Kevin’s post to the left?\
The way the pledge drive works is that if the goal isn’t meant, none of the money pledged will go to Ficly and no one will be charged. At this point to be so close to the goal is great, but Ficly continues to need that extra little bit to reach the ultimate the goal.\
I just wanted to clarify things, since I don’t think the process is intuitive.\
Thanks to everyone who has pledged!

Ficly is doing fine, and it’s a nice break from work stuff to go play in something uncomplicated without a bunch of dependencies. The community is great and they produce some fantastic stories.\
As I mentioned in my previous post, I’m enamored with Kickstarter and asked them if I could create a project for Ficly to see if we could get the community to help us out with the hosting costs for the coming year. I figured \$800 would cover the co-location facility and our Amazon bill (we store all the images people upload there and probably some other stuff in the future), and maybe some upgrades to Ficly’s box (I just realized I should add more RAM, for example).\
They said yes, and Wednesday night, I created the Ficly Server Support Project. In the first 48 hours, we’ve raised almost 75% of the total, and we still have 31 days to go!!\
If you can help out, I’d appreciate it. Ficly’s not going anywhere, but the help is definitely appreciated and makes things a little easier on Jason and me.\
Thanks!

It’s not done, but I nagged Jason enough so we’ve launched it anyway!! I present to you, my dear readers… Ficly. There’s a long story to tell about how any why Ficly came to be and why we couldn’t leave well enough alone. I might as well tell it.\
Building ficlets, for both Jason and me, was the best experience of our professional lives (he told me that, anyway, and I believe him). We had total freedom to do the right thing, which is rare, especially at AOL. We, along with Ari, Cindy and Jenna, built something beautiful. And then, it all sort of went weird. Everyone eventually left AOL, and I was left alone to keep the site kind of up and running even though I’d been told I wasn’t allowed to work on it anymore. Then, I left AOL last summer to go work at Music Intelligence Solutions on stuff I’d never done before.\
In December, AOL announced that ficlets would be shut down. I went and created the ficlets memorial, because it would be criminal to let all those stories just disappear. A bunch of valiant souls still inside AOL battled hard to get the company to either give me ficlets outright or donate it to a non-profit – it obviously didn’t happen. Jason and I e-mailed back and forth a few times about how sad it was to see ficlets die and that we really should do something about it. But, who’s got the time?\
It was Jason who pushed until I agreed. Jason got Tom Osborne and Owen Shifflett from Viget Labs to jump in and save the day (because you really don’t want me designing anything). They designed what you see on the site, and it’s more than I could have hoped. Our pal Joe helped out when he could, and I worked a couple hours at night during the week and a few hours on weekends when I wasn’t working late at the office. Five months later, and several helping hands later, here we are.\
I’m extremely happy with how it’s turned out, and with the reaction from the community so far. We wouldn’t have built Ficly if the ficlets community wasn’t so great. We did it for them, and because we have a lot of fun working together – even when it’s over e-mail.\
I don’t think of Ficly as a “side” project and we’re certainly not a startup. Ficly is an art project. We built it out of love – and a passion for fostering creativity. I think Jason put it best in an e-mail, “My job isn’t building web pages. It’s delivering happiness by the kilobyte.”\
I don’t know where Ficly goes from here. I know I have a laundry list of stuff I wanted to do on ficlets that we’ll probably get around to eventually. For now, it feels good to have done what we’ve done so far. It was hard making time for it, but I’m glad we did.